Nvidia Embraces The Power Of The Cloud

Microsoft sounded like a bunch of raving madmen at the Xbox One’s reveal event when they kept talking about the power of the cloud and how it will revolutionise the way you brush your teeth. Granted the technology is capable of some great things such as performing some processing tasks and storing various game data to be accessed anywhere such as with Forza 5’s Drivatar system.

Enter Nvidia, who recently showed off this incredible glimpse of the future of tablet graphics. They too have embraced the spectral cloud with a cost-effective way for developers to apply real-time lighting effects into their game using said cloud.

I may be studying engineering but I don’t have the fainstest clue how this all works so here’s a diagram to explain how the effects get from Nvidia’s CloudLight base to the games using it and again.

Here’s the blurb from Nvidia themselves:

“We introduce CloudLight, a system for computing indirect lighting in the Cloud to support real-time rendering for interactive 3D applications on a user’s local device. CloudLight maps the traditional graphics pipeline onto a distributed system. That differs from a single-machine renderer in three fundamental ways.

“First, the mapping introduces potential asymmetry between computational resources available at the Cloud and local device sides of the pipeline. Second, compared to a hardware memory bus, the network introduces relatively large latency and low bandwidth between certain pipeline stages. Third, for multi-user virtual environments, a Cloud solution can amortize expensive global illumination costs across users.

“Our new CloudLight framework explores tradeoffs in different partitions of the global illumination workload between Cloud and local devices, with an eye to how available network and computational power influence design decisions and image quality. We describe the tradeoffs and characteristics of mapping three known lighting algorithms to our system and demonstrate scaling for up to 50 simultaneous CloudLight users.”

Head over to the video up top for a better explanation complete with moving pictures.

This looks like some great tech although cloud technology isn’t feasibly accessible in regions such as South Africa. It will certainly be a help to smaller developers who want to have these great visual features in their games.